Discipline Drives Digital Excellence in Pharma

Digital Excellence Ambitions Thrive as Technology Advances

Digital excellence is a firm’s ability to use digital media and technology to work with customers and consistently create business and customer value. Pharmaceutical firms are recognizing that doing business with customers digitally generates enormous opportunity. Earlier this year, Novartis and Qualcomm Ventures partnered to set up a $100 million fund to explore how mobile and digital technology can change the way healthcare is delivered to patients. More recently, Biogen and Google announced a formal collaboration to use sensor technology and big data analysis to study the development of multiple sclerosis. DT’s most recent poll found that, with respect to the digital excellence opportunity, digital leaders at large pharmaceutical companies are focusing on:

• Customer experience (CX) management. Last year, we spotted a few visionaries who were taking CX design and management seriously. This year, almost everyone has jumped on the CX bandwagon (sometimes calling it “customer engagement” or “customer excellence”). Multichannel and digital teams are frantically road-showing customer journey maps, persona-driven design, and voice of the customer programs—claiming an even bigger remit for digital excellence.
• Digitally empowered sales reps. Several firms are executing large-scale CRM implementation programs and fine-tuning their tablet detailing platforms to give field teams options to communicate with their customers beyond face-to-face meetings. Others are taking it a step further, building even more digital capability to fulfill their vision of automated customer communication based on a predefined, orchestrated customer journey that seamlessly integrates different channels and promotional tactics.
• Content excellence. Almost all pharma firms recognize the power of differentiating content in customer interactions. A few are putting their money where their mouth is, instituting a separate content center of excellence or a dedicated workstream. Others are focusing on their back office, installing digital asset management tools or optimizing content workflows to make it easier to share content across the company, simplify content usage with dynamic (pre)approval, or better coordinate content between HQ and local brand teams.
• Digital-infused R&D. While most digital leaders are making it a priority to optimize their commercial model with digital or multichannel capabilities, only a few are actively considering a disruptive role for digital in other divisions. One division stands out: R&D. We saw at least two global pharmaceutical companies—a top-three firm and a top-twenty firm—that aim to inject digital into their R&D organization. They want R&D to consistently consider the role of digital technology in enhancing therapies; this would expand the scope of digital teams all the way through to clinical trials.

Disciplined Transformation Management Fuels Digital Excellence

Despite their investments in and focus on digital, none of the sixteen pharmaceutical firms we assessed said that they had excellent digital maturity in their capabilities; only four reported that it was good [Report: The State of Digital Excellence in the Pharmaceutical Industry, 2015: Capabilities]. Without basic digital capabilities in place, pharma’s digital transformation efforts will suffer from false starts, leaving ambitions unfulfilled. Each company is uniquely positioned along the journey toward digital excellence and copes with a distinct set of challenges and opportunities. That said, we found several common factors that drive success throughout the digital transformation journey at any company, including:

• Discipline. The rate at which a firm builds digital capability depends on its ability to align it to the business model and amend day-to-day operations. This in turn depends on many different change management factors, most of which have little to do with technology or digital media, such as the extent to which a vision is in place, whether the executive team drives the vision, whether a plan to deliver the mission is in place, and whether there is sufficient budget, talent, and decision-making power down the line. Measuring digital excellence as a digital capability uncovers a strong relationship between a firm’s perceived level of discipline and its overall digital excellence (see Figure 1). The link between transformation readiness and digital excellence is even stronger (see Figure 2). Firms that systematically manage digital transformation have higher digital excellence maturity than those that don’t.
• Importance. Digital excellence transformation inevitably changes day-to-day operations—but firms must first acknowledge that digital is important to their overall success. It’s clear from our research that pharmaceutical firms that acknowledge this have higher digital excellence maturity scores (see Figure 3). While most digital teams recognize the importance of digital, we find that marketing organizations still lag behind on this count, failing to see the extent of the impact that digital can have for their brand and customers.
• Knowledge. Company-wide knowledge about digital media and technologies is a key foundational element on which to build digital excellence. A lack of knowledge can be a twofold disadvantage. First, it slows progress; people can’t pursue a clear set of opportunities that they’re not aware of. Second, it paralyzes the company, because no one can articulate the details of what changes are required to day-to-day operations. We asked senior digital leaders to assess their organization’s knowledge of thirteen key digital capabilities, including email, CRM, and mobile; the data clearly shows that digital excellence maturity increases with how much companies know about digital capabilities (see Figure 4).